The Two Towers Acquired!

[bunnyboo]

Let it be said that I waste no time. Well, honestly, The Two Towers took about five minutes to pick up—gosh, I love having such a convenient library.

My hopes for this? I want to see more Sam/Frodo relationship stuff with the addition of Gollum into the mix. I thought their dynamic in the movies needed expansion, so I’ll be glad to see it in action here. Hm. I also want to have some time with Aragorn; he seems interesting but he didn’t have much time to shine other than his introduction in Bree. I would like less elves, please. Legolas seems alright in a sort of jokey, light-hearted way, but elves mean long lectures on history about people I don’t care about. I’m expecting something darker and more serious—less hobbits being silly and hobbit-y. That’s fine as long as it gets replaced with some good character moments. I also assume that Sam will play a bigger role, something that I’m really looking forward to.

One thing of note that I wanted to bring up is, in my edition, there’s a little note from Peter Beagle. I’m pretty sure it was in Fellowship too, but I ignored it in favor of Tolkien’s preface. I think this quote is worth bringing up:

“I’ve never thought it was an accident that Tolkien’s works waited more than ten years to explode into popularity almost overnight. The Sixties were no fouler a decade than the Fifties - they merely reaped the Fifties’ foul harvest - but they were the years when millions of people grew aware that the industrial society had become paradoxically unlivable, incalculably immoral, and ultimately deadly. In terms of passwords, the Sixties were the time when the word progress lost its ancient holiness, and escape stopped being comically obscene. The impulse is being called reactionary now, but lovers of Middle-earth want to go there. I would myself, like a shot.

For in the end it is Middle-earth and its dwellers that we love, not Tolkien’s considerable gifts in showing it to us. I said once that the world he charts was there long before him, and I still believe it. He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day’s madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.”

It's kind of funny that this is right before Tolkien saying that he doesn’t want anyone interpreting his work as being based off real-life events. There’s environmental themes in The Lord of the Rings, even I picked up on that, but Beagle seems to be taking this as a political statement. I don’t think it is. At least, it wasn’t intended to be. Death of the author and all that. I do find that last paragraph meaningful, though. It is the characters we connect with, the world we want to imagine was real. And Tolkien is drawing on common mythology and themes, tapping into real human struggles and emotions. That last sentence seems very modern to me—a rejection of the historical myths of virtuous colonizers and conquerors. I’m not sure how I feel about it in relation to Tolkien. I might have to come back to that.